Bokura wa Minna Kawaisou episode 2: the tough life of a high school guy

Everyone enjoys their summer break at the Kawai Complex, which gives the chance for Usa to get a bit closer to Ritsu. The episode ends with the entrance of Sayaka, who seems extremely normal in comparison with all the other inhabitants of the manor… Or does she?

Impression

Yup, I like this show.

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I’ll admit that I thought this would be a little less of a guy romance than the main male protagonist suggested, but it seems like they are going through the harem/teenage guy route fairly strongly already. What that means is that 1) it makes it a little bit more predictable, but 2) it also means I as a girl get to see the guy side of things for once. Moreover, it seems as though the target audience can still include girls as well, since the romance and the comedy work for both genders (it works for me, anyways).

So far, what I’m most impressed with, however, is the ambience of the show. Not only is the art and animation absolutely flawless, but it works incredibly well with the story and manages to move emotions with such simple things. The bubble scene, for example, made me smile in wonder at the big bubbles and the shiny rainbows just as Mayumi and Ritsu were doing the same – normally I would have found a scene like this incredibly cheesy. In addition to the extremely humouristic moments which gave us a bit of a break on the beautiful scenes, the refreshing feeling thrown at us simply with the show’s production demonstrates much quality which we don’t see often – especially not in romance.

I’m also glad to see Ritsu coming out of her shell a lot faster than I expected her to, keeping her personality out of the cliché “don’t want to talk” behaviour. Instead, she went down the tsundere route – which, I guess, is even more generic… Well, whatever. She’s cute as hell; I don’t even care anymore. I feel like her character hasn’t developed well enough yet for us to truly enjoy her as a main girl character, although I’d say that so far the producers are doing a darn good job in making us really, really like her cute personality. Building up a good character afterwards would bump the show from great to awesome, and I really hope that the show goes down this route. It remains, after all, a romance show, and I hope to see a lot of romance and drama aside from all the stupid shit that happens all the time.

We also got to meet Sayaka, whose normality seems way too emphasized to be real. Unfortunately, we couldn’t get a true grasp on her real personality just yet; whatever she does, I’m sure we’ll have quite a bit of fun with that in the next episode. With her, I believe the “harem” is completed; note the quotations here, because it isn’t really a harem, but rather a group of girls meant to be there for guys to fantasize over. We’ll get some fanservice scenes here and there for fap material, but I don’t expect either Mayumi or Sayaka (and hopefully not Sumiko O_O) to ever get interested in Usa as a romantic partner. They seem more like crazy college ladies than anything else.